Cheryl:
Excellent collection of posts on the mysterious silence of the press. I too, wonder why some ambitious reporter out there doesn't see the possibility of a Pulitzer out of this. Here is some conjecture.
Journalists pride themselves on facts, and on not being fooled. There are darn few reporters with the technical background to evaluate this issue. And there are many in the Y2K aware community who are concerned, frightened, emotional.....ooooh, all those messy things. I truly believe that most reporters are more afraid of being laughed at, at being called emotional, than they are at missing this story.
The other point is from a friend of mine who is a psychiatrist. He tells me that there is a big difference between denial, which is unconscious, and disavowal. He thinks that Y2K is a phenomenon of disavowal. This is where people consciously reject evidence that is right in front of them because it is too threatening.
What is the threat? Could be TEOTWAKI. Or it could simply be a big, bloody mess. Maintenance, data corruption, trying to run the economy on bad info.... In either case, we're going to have to give up our Blind Faith that technologists will voluntarily do the type of quality control to justify our faith. It's not as though we are magically going to have well-engineered quality software after 1/1/00.
I understand that disavowal is actually harder to treat than denial. I'm beginning to believe it.
Christine |
